In spite of its meritocratic aspirations, academia is not a just place. There is a striking disconnect between the ideals of academia – meritocracy and an emphasis on talent no matter where it comes from – and the reality. This includes prestige bias (in graduate admissions and hiring, see also my earlier paper here), an unwelcome climate for minorities such as trans people), ableism, sexual harassment and assault cases, and so on.
What can we do to improve our departments, and particularly, our profession? In this post I'll focus on leadership in academia, but the post might well apply to other domains, such as the corporate private sector, any kind of sector that has problems in equal opportunity for employees, sexual harassment, and so on. I'm going to explore two ideas from Chinese philosophy (both mainly from the Warring States period) that propose two different kinds of intervention, one is more focused on civility and change of culture, the other more on institutional and legal frameworks.
The aim of both kinds of interventions should ideally be to promote both harmonious relationships and flourishing of members of the profession (not only of tenure-track professors but also, graduate students, adjuncts, etc), and to promote justice, particularly for people who are not in positions of power, such as graduate students, adjuncts, and members of various minorities.
Cultivating propriety
One way we could improve academic structures is to focus on propriety, or civility (li, 禮, in Confucian philosophy). Confucian philosophers such as Mengzi, and of course, Confucius (Kongzi) himself, thought that the best forms of leadership do not require an emphasis on external structure or on punishment and reward, but rather on the cultivation of the right attitudes within the self. If leaders lead by example, other people will follow suit. In Mengzi's view, all humans have the "sprouts" of moral goodness within themselves, and it is a matter of cultivation to render these into full-blown virtues (benevolence, justice, propriety, and wisdom).
For example, we have an untutored sense of compassion, which, properly cultivated, can grow into benevolence. Benevolence helps us to make reasonable adjustments for colleagues for work/life balance, to respond promptly and provide feedback to graduate students, etc. It is acceptable, even inevitable, for Confucians to be graded in one's concerns for others. It's fine to be more concerned about your own graduate students than about someone else's, but ultimately, one's concern should extend to everyone. As Mengzi wrote, rather optimistically, "In general, having these four sprouts within oneself, if one knows to fill them all out, it will be like a fire starting up, a spring breaking through! If one can merely fill them out, they will be sufficient to care for all within the Four Seas” (2A7.3, 4, Van Norden translation). By contrast, if one fails to develop these virtues, then one isn't even able to care for one's own parents (a minimalistic duty according to Mengzi), or in the context of departments, to exert proper care for one's own (graduate) students.
One of the Mengzian sprouts is civility or propriety (li, 禮). There is an enduring worry: calls for civility are often calls for disempowered minorities to shut up. For instance, as I wrote about this civility game promoted by the BBC, civility seems to be a demand for people who are already subject to racist abuse to not make their racist abusers uncomfortable by challenging their preconceptions.
However, perhaps in response to these lingering worries, Amy Olberding has recently argued that the Confucian demand for civility/propriety is primarily a demand for the self to be civil:
Confucian advocacy is framed firmly in the first person: I should be civil. I should cultivate in myself the habits of emotion, mind, and conduct to make respectful and considerate engagement with others my steady norm. This is an approach to civility sorely missing from our popular discourse. Perhaps one reason for this is that my own failures of civility are so much less satisfying to consider than yours.
I think this approach dispels some of the worries for calls for civility, as civility becomes something one needs to personally strive for and not someone one can accuse one's (disempowered) interlocutors of, with demands such as "Please revise your tone!" While, like Olberding, I am attracted to the idea of civility, and of virtuous conduct in general, I do not think that this entirely takes the problem away of civility policing. For one thing, suppose we each took it upon ourselves to try to be civil. People who notice that their demand for justice is not taken well might then feel compelled to self-police their speech, until they fall prey to what Kristie Dotson terms "epistemic smothering". This occurs when a speaker realizes her audience is not able or unwilling to take up her testimony, and so she limits and self-censures her speech so that "the testimony contains only content for which one’s audience demonstrates testimonial competence”.
To avoid this problem, one thing we can do, drawing further on Mengzian ethics, is to realize that civility is just one of the ingredients that make our interactions better. We need to exercise discernment to evaluate in any proper situation whether the demand for justice might outweigh the demand for civility (Mengzi himself gives the example of a situation where one would save one's sister-in-law from drowning even though it violates the ritual prohibition of physical contact between a man and his sister-in law, 4A17).
Lots of our institutional interactions are steeped in propriety/civility so I think it is not possible, and not wise, to try to dispense with it. Our interactions in email exchanges, conferences, etc. are all formed by propriety, and it is irksome if someone violates such norms, e.g., someone at a conference who asks a very long question and then keeps on asking follow-ups, someone who addresses a female professor he's unfamiliar with as "Mrs" or even "Ms", knowing this is likely not her preferred title. Civility, particularly if focused on the self and not as a tool to condemn others (as Olberding recommends) can improve our interactions. If we become more mindful of what civility demands, particularly in our interactions with people who are in worse positions than us (intersectionally understood), this would be an improvement upon a mere mindless following of rules while punching down whenever one can get away with it. The main risk I see is that the call for civility would disempower already vulnerable people, but if one keeps in mind other goods such as justice, I think this risk can be mitigated.
Instituting the proper structures
The legalist philosopher Han Feizi had the insight that most leaders, be they presidents or department chairs, are not exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. Most are somewhere in between. He thought that if we set up the right structures, with appropriate instruments for punishment and reward, we are more likely to achieve enduring good government in which people can flourish than if we relied on people's own virtuous conduct alone. The legalist insight applies today: if we do not have structures and appropriate instruments of punishment and reward, people particularly in positions of leadership would need to rely on their individual judgment in particular situations, and that judgment might fail.
I was reminded of Han Feizi by reading this piece by Kristina Gerhman on the Searle case, in which she pleads for appropriate institutional structures to prevent situations like this from occurring ever again:
[I spoke out] for a very specific reason, which is that I firmly believe that professors, administrators, and others in positions of power in academia are responsible for creating INSTITUTIONAL barriers to the kinds of predatory, undermining, and alienating behavior that John Searle’s undergraduate research assistants have been subjected to for years and years. We are supposed to be mentors and educators with firm and healthy boundaries even in our closest relationships with our students and mentees. And our mentoring and teaching relationships are supposed to be geared towards the intellectual and professional development and growth of our students/mentees. In philosophy, we by and large fail at that as a matter of institutional culture.
By creating institutional structures, in the form of not only protocols that help students and professors maintain healthy boundaries, but also in appropriate punishment/action if these protocols are violated, we would be able to prevent many egregious cases from happening. Legal and institutional structures are not a replacement of the cultivation of individual good behaviour, but provide a context in which some difficult decisions can be streamlined into a broader institutional context (e.g., how to report one is being sexually harassed/assaulted, and how to evaluate claims that this has occurred).
Legalist philosophers were correct that the creation of these structures need to come with appropriate instruments for punishment/correction. In a recent interaction with other philosophers, the worry was voiced that such institutional structures would be (mis)used to retaliate. While I can see that this is a worry people might have, I still think it is preferable to have real instruments to help enforce structures rather than toothless best practice guides. Best practice guides can have value in helping people to get a grasp of what good forms of conduct are, but alone they cannot guard against systematic problems of oppression, harassment, and so on. This piece by Catherine MacKinnon on #metoo gives a solid overview of how both changes in culture and in legal structures (establishing the legal claim for sexual harassment in the 1970s) went hand in hand.
Here, MacKinnon argues that legal change alone cannot effect cultural change: "Just because something is legally prohibited doesn’t mean it stops. Maybe exceptional acts do, but not pervasive structural practices. Equal pay has been the law for decades and still does not exist. Racial discrimination is nominally illegal in many ways but is still widely practiced against people of color, including in lethal forms."
The take-home message then is to both focus on the kind of propriety, primarily in ourselves, that would make academia more harmonious and more just, and to also, in addition create structural instruments and barriers that make bad actions more difficult and less rewarding to perform.
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